Are you a Small Business Owner? Do you feel the overwhelm of planning your content for social media for your business?  Maybe that overwhelm manifests by way of the fact that you just DON’T plan your content for social media?

As a smart entrepreneur, you know the necessity of your brand existing on social media in 2019, and now you want to exist for SUCCESS.  We are here to help.

---

This post brought to you by Syd & Michelle Social Management, LLC.

contact us today to see what we can do to help you!

---

How to Plan your Social Media Content Like a Boss

It’s probably no news to you that continuing along the same.exact.path with the same.exact.plan will NOT yield you new results. So, are you ready to remix your plan of action when it comes to your Social Media Content?

Heck yes, or you wouldn’t be reading this post… so let’s get right into it.

There’s a few main points I want you to think about when diving into this seemingly daunting task:

1. There is NO cookie cutter plan, no secret pill, no ‘one size fits all’ content calendar… and if anyone is trying to sell you that, they are lying to you.  I’M JUST KEEPING IT REAL HERE!
2. At first, content strategizing planning and creating will be a time consuming task… BUT, do you remember learning to tie your shoes? It took you a while the first handful of times, but now you’re a pro – you know the secret tricks, and it barely takes you a fraction of the time it used to… IT IS THE SAME FOR PLANNING YOUR CONTENT! You just gotta START!
3. If you’re a fly-by-the-seat-of-your-pants entrepreneur, we are about to overhaul your entire business strategy! Don’t let me lose you already… Goal Setting and broad to micro spectrum strategies will keep your business afloat and almost feeling as though your social media is on autopilot.  CAN I GET A HALLELUJAH?! Now, that’s not saying this mindset shift is going to be easy peasy… but guess what?! We have a support group for that! Join our FREE Social Empower Tribe for access to a group full of small business owners and entrepreneurs trying to master content creating and strategizing JUST LIKE YOU!

Now, I should probably mention, Syd here… and my background in fitness and fitness instructing has my motivation and share of passionate information such as this topic, emotionally charged and motivating in a pushier way.  If you, too, are a fitness junkie, you’ll love this post!

What is your business ‘why’

No bullshit here, and I’m sure you’ve heard this before: If you don’t define your ‘why’ for what you do, and have no passion behind your business endeavors, your potential clients and anyone your posts reach WILL SEE RIGHT THROUGH YOU. Plus, even more important… when the going gets challenging or you face obstacles, knowing and truly living your WHY will help you get through the funk.

I want you to write in big letters bolded, underlined, italicized: WHY you do what you do, WHAT impact you want to make on people, and your GOALS.  Post it on social media & tag us: @sydandmichelle #sydandmichelleWHY

Establish your Business Goals

Plan Social Media Content based around your Goals:

First thing’s first, we need to know what your goals are.  As a smart entrepreneur, you know how important declaring goals are to your business. Frankly, how else would we measure our successes and those items that need more improvement?

Let’s look at three scopes of Goals to keep in mind before we dive into planning your social media: Broad, Narrow, & Micro.

Broad Scope:

Look at the YEAR ahead.  What big ticket items are on your forecast? Product launches? HUGE sales? Grand Re-openings? Etc.  Make note of these dates, and the goals.  This will come into play in the scheduling

Narrow scope:

Look at the MONTH ahead. Plan out your marketing strategies based around your monthly goals and promotions you will be running.  Make lists of each platform you reach out to your clients from (facebook, instagram, twitter, email, etc) and create structured plans of attack to get your message out to them.

MICRO Scope:

Now, the WEEK ahead – what’s happening in Pop culture or your local community? Sometimes these things can alter how you plan out your social media content, and that’s ok! Trending topics boost post performance, so keep your eyes peeled! Maybe it’s just something as simple as a caption that needs tweaked or a hashtag that needs added to hit up current events.

Use a Organizational Outlet

Now that you’ve got your goals down, you’re ready to start looking into HOW you’re going to ORGANIZE your amazing information we are about to plan.

We LOVE Trello, and if you’ve never heard of it before, it’s time you tried it!  You can download our FREE Social Media Content Planning And Organization Board here. But make sure you hop into the Social Empower Tribe for support for this DIY board!

Gimme the goods!

Do you use a different organizational outlet? Share with us in the comments what your go to is!

Content Creation: Declare your 5 Topics

This is a biggie.  Before you start creating content, we want to establish some categories to maximize batching.  Each brand or business has at least 5 topics or content categories that all their posts they will share will fall into.

For example, Syd & Michelle’s content categories are: Tips, Our Services, Resources to share, Sobek & Sully, Entrepreneur Motivation.

For ours, we made very BROAD categories for ‘Tips’, and ‘Resources to share’.  And for ‘Our Services’ we will always be adding value and solving problems for our following to answer their question of ‘Why do I need this service I didn’t know/realize Syd & Michelle had?’  We will go more into detail on how to declare your 5 in the Social Empower Tribe.

Batch your content

AKA MASS PRODUCE your content! Sit down and tackle a category a day! Take an hour on a Sunday to Batch all your Motivational quote posts for the month, or even the next three! Once your mind is thinking within this category, the captions will start to flow out of your fingers.  Use your Trello board to organize and store this content you’re creating.

Wash. Rinse. Repeat.

Need additional tips on Batching? You guessed it, hop on into the Social Empower Tribe.

Read more about batching content here.

 

Schedule your Content

Now that everything is batched and curated, the last step is to SCHEDULE that beautiful content!!! There are a TON of specialized post scheduling services out there, and we are still searching for our ABSOLUTE favorite to share with you.  Currently, you can’t go wrong scheduling natively from your Facebook Page or Group.  Stay tuned for our fix for Instagram.

You can also look into hooking up Zapier to your Trello board and creating a Zap to auto publish or schedule if you move a card from one list to the other. (Did that blow your mind?! Yeah, mine too!)  I warned you that the sky is the limit with Trello! If that’s too techy for you, no worries, we have something in the works!

As we play with new Scheduling services, & spoiler alert DEVELOP OUR OWN, we will share our findings within (you guessed it) the Social Empower Tribe! So if you haven’t joined it yet, join us:

Social Empower Tribe Closed group · 112 members Join Group We are sassy, social media, #nosyaf fun-loving ladies who want to bring like-minded individuals together to empower each other towards goals and growt…

Go hop in that group, for real ya’ll, because this scheduling platform we are soon to launch is THE REAL DEAL! Track Analytics, conversions, schedule recurring content, gain additional reach without spending a dime on ads, get access to real time help from the Syd & Michelle team, SEE ALL YOUR INBOXES, COMMENTS, DMs, MENTIONS, REVIEWS in one place, connect up to 25 social profiles, AND MORE!!

BONUS: our ‘tribe’ of bossbabe/brawn entrepreneurs are always learning, always ready to collaborate, and down to support YOU along your journey to small biz success.  We can’t wait to see you there!

Want to read more details on batching content? Read this post.

---

If you found value in what we shared, share it with a friend, save it, pin it, etc! We greatly appreciate the love.  Sharing is caring.

Be sure to subscribe to the blog, we will be sharing additional information about marketing tips, social media success, and more!

xoxo,

Syd

(& Michelle)

---

How to Schedule Social Media Content

How to create and use a social media content calendar

How having a content calendar can increase your productivity

Social Media Content Calendar

How to make a social media content calendar

2018 Content Calendar

2018 Social Media Content Calendar

2019 Content Calendar

2019 Social Media Content calendar

Get rid of social media overwhelm

The Content Calendar Cheatsheet

The Content Calendar Template

Streamline your social media

How to make the most of your time on social media

Social Media Content Strategy for Small Businesses

Small Business Owner’s guide to Social Media Strategy

Small Business Owner’s Guide to Social Media Content Planning

Batch and Organize your Social Content like a Boss

Use trello to streamline your Social Media Content Planning

Social Media Manager’s guide to using Trello